Rachel Maddow on Mike Pence's anti-gay stance

Rachel Maddow has been many times moved by the recent election, but the MSNBC host got particularly emotional Friday night while talking about vice president-elect Mike Pence and his anti-gay policies.

After going over the long, difficult process that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage, Maddow pointed out that in 2013, Pence signed legislation as governor of Indiana to make it a felony to “lie” on an application for a marriage license, which only had space for one man and one woman.

“So, ultimately, marriage equality becomes the law of the land everywhere thanks to the Supreme Court, but in Indiana, under Mike Pence, gay couples faced 18 months in prison and $10,000 for applying to get married,” she says, getting choked up. “Just applying to married put you in jail under Mike Pence.”

Later, the host described Pence being selected as Donald Trump’s running mate.

“When the Republican party picked as their nominee this year Donald Trump, a man who has honestly kind of a confusing, incoherent position on a lot of culture war issues, including gay rights, you would think it would’ve been really huge news. You’d think it would’ve been an acute point of focus in this campaign when the Republican presidential nominee — who has this strange, sort of hard to follow, internally contradictory set of policies on these issues — he picked as his running mate the most vociferously and consistently anti-gay statewide elected official in the country.”

She continued to detail some of his other policies: “Mike Pence said you should not only take away money from HIV and AIDS programs, he said AIDS funding should be taken away from serving people with HIV and AIDS because instead it should be diverted into government-funded programs designed to cure people from being gay, to try to fix gay people. That’s what the government should spend its money on — not this AIDS stuff.”